Symphony of Flesh and Bone
by Rose of Brisingr
Summary: AU : Will has a car crash and loses parts of his ability to remember. The disorder is diagnosed as a temporary memory loss. Among other things, he does not recognize his fiance Hannibal and (of some unknown reason) suddenly thinks that instead Frederick Chilton, who always showed mutual interest for Will, is his life companion. A struggle between the psychiatrists sets in.
1. Information

Hello first, dear readers :)

Just before you start reading the story I want you to know something about the AU-Universe I put it in (so that there is no confusion here in the first place ;3).

In my AU, after Will has shot Abel Gideon, Hannibal has taken even more care of the profiler and finally decided to diagnoze the encephalitis earlier so it could be healed properly. After this he decides to invite Will to his home, pour some wine and tell him everything (EVERYTHING. Cannibalism and romantic feelings included). After this information drunken Will is shocked and desperate but, well, dizzy too, so he soon passes out on Hannibal's couch and falls asleep. Hannibal covers him with a blanket and stays with him the whole night. In the morning when Will wakes up, the first thing Hannibal does is to kiss and tell him, how much he means to him. Will, after some serious thoughts, admits to himself that he loves Hannibal too, despite everything, even cannibalism.

They become a couple then and are soon engaged afterwards. (Meanwhile Freddie Lounds is killed and Frederick Chilton reveals Will his true feelings as well but Will denies him… more or less willingful.)

At this point the story takes place and I really hope you still want to read it ^^'

Here is the whole summary again (it was too long to fit in, unfortunately) :

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><p><em>AU : Will has a car crash and loses parts of his ability<em>  
><em>to remember. The disorder is diagnosed as a temporary memory loss. Among other things, he does not recognize his fiance Hannibal again and (of some unknown reason) suddenly thinks that instead Frederick Chilton is his life companion. Federick, who has already expressed mutual interest for the profiler several times before, takes the unexpected opportunity leaving Will in this belief, also because the doctor warns to confront Will too early with the truth, as this could cause unpleasant consequences. Too rapid comparison with this might put his memories to sleep forever.<em>  
><em>So Hannibal must therefore bear that HIS fiance suddenly lives in Fredericks house and sees him as his only true love, at least for a certain amount of time. And the uncertainty, whether Will will ever remember again or not, almost kills him. <em>

_Especially since Frederick of course uses the bestowed time together to convince Will that he is obviously the perfect choice for being his lover. _

_However, Will has to struggle with conflicting feelings himself and comes relatively soon to a point where he no longer knows how to distinguish reality from memory and truth from lies. They melt into each other, only to repel again. He is caught between the idea that he found a tender,caring man in Frederick and confused by the powerful presence of the psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, who torments him with feelings that no loyal, happy man should ever be aware of. _

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><p>In the meantime I try to write the former events out. in a collection of HannigramChillyWilly/Brownham OS called "Family Portrait."

Maybe you want to take a look at this work as well :  s/10581396/1/Family-Portrait

And now, finally, have fun with reading!

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><p>PS : I'd appreciate your feedback very much ^^<p> 


	2. Prologue

**Prologue**

**~Amnesia~**

_**A **hospital is the preferred residence of God for life and death._

_Disease and decay are as much at home here as the miracle of birth and the iniquities of deformity. We all see the light of day after we were wrapped and bathed several months in meat and darkness. We all say goodbye to this light with a final decline of our eyelashes following a silently pronounced __**Farewell** to return to the darkness from which we crawled to the top, naked, vulnerable, smeared with blood and grease. Screaming._  
><em>The origin refers to us as the mothers who gave birth and the doctors who rescued same source that nourished us, happening at the end of our rotting corpses amicably and sipping the essence of our souls like an aged wine pressed from the curved grapes of the finest vines. <em>

_Is this the justice of God? _

_No. _

_It is the settlement of mortality. Angels and demons operate without change, smell - and grace. They know no limit, no restriction of the year, because it does not exist. No other species except ours maintains the biblical mercy to be allowed to die._

_The grave is our privilege._

_The limited rite of our cells drives us to achieve great things in the gift of time. Creation and creativity evolve, revolutionize. Love and hate equally bloom and bear their splendid thorns on display, sliding down on the flowers, stab and carve a pattern._  
><em>Meat is a perishable commodity.<em>  
><em>This makes it juicy, the taste is sharpened.<em>  
><em>Blood clots after certain duration.<em>  
><em>This is good because it refreshes the thirst for more.<em>

_In general,people are a very fragile self-cosmos, each for him/herself, beyond gender, color, race or nation. Bones splinter. Teeth break. Hair tears. Skin burns. This is the same for each one. Everyone feels pain and everyone has tears that must be shed._

_I cannot remember when I cried last time. Over the years, the events have become rare for it. Usually one cries because of grief, because of compassion. Or one may cry about a personal loss and sometimes even in temper._  
><em>Why should I ever cry? There was no valid reason, no tragedy, no family, no friends, I had to mourn for. Not after I had finished with the experiences of my youth.<em>

_But now this condition has changed significantly within the last few months and it confuses me till today. Now there's someone who touches me. Someone who moves the heart in me. Who inflates my lungs and stops my breath._

_The One. The first. The last._

_Every day I look at him and every night I give myself this consideration anew closely by letting my mouth wander over his body, inhale him with my hands, cover his existence with my own flesh and blood. Pressed, skin to skin, grated, mixed, blended, brought to ecstasy. In this dark, lips have eyes and eyes have teeth._

_They bite everywhere, everywhere ..._

_When I look at him, I see the heavens breaking above me. I see the ragged edges of the clouds, hear the crackling fire that gnaws at them. And I love it, I love **him**, carrying the chaos to me andspicing my cold._

_It givesme resurrection from the ashes._

_And is he not worth all the tears that I've been saving from day to day?_  
><em>Is he not worth all the blood, I would emphasize for him on wood, stone and earth?<em>  
><em>Is he not rewarding all the doubts he gives me and all the pain he takes away?<em>

_Theloneliness is a beast nesting in the furniture of my house since I can remember. It lives in the fabric of my clothes, in my satin bed linen, behind the shadows casting my eyelashes. He shoos it away with his words, his voice, his smile, which applies to me alone and I'll do the same with the monster I allow by no means, in contrast to the true monstrosity lurking in his depths._  
><em>I lock it away, let it go hungry, bring it to beg. It will not bother him as long as I'm here. My beast, however, is like an old love, a long withered violet that politely withdraws when it is not desired. I created it and taught it loneliness is a part of me, as it has become a part of Will, and he internalizes a rebellious temperament himself, so you can not blame his beast to fall in a same behavior. To be inferior in nothing.<em>

_I have often drawn him, tried to banish his facade on paper through coal and feverish precision. To set up a monument without a funeral feast._  
><em>It will not succeed. How could it? I'm doomed to dishonor something perfect with imperfect tools.<em>  
><em>How could I catch the gleam in his eyes? The hurricane in them that sweeps over a Pacific ocean without a name. How should I interpret the smoothness of his skin on the fingernail thin layer of mashed wood, with all its imperfections and its wonders.<em>  
><em>And what about his voice? The sounds that I am able to wrest him? Noise can not be taken by the leadership of a quill nor removed with blotting strips.<em>  
><em>Is it possible to erase silence? Can one dip the sound of a scream in color? These are idle thoughts and yet the attempt remains a useless attribute to the blemish of our half-baked skills.<em>

_Nothing can do him justice. No one will undercut his value._  
><em>No one will ever know him, as I am able to know him and that's good. It is necessary.<em>

_Heis so much more than I can take and so much less than I praise him. Maybe I'll never be able to define his beauty. Maybe I'll never want to._

_Maybe he's my life. Maybe I'm his death._  
><em>Then he is my morningstar, and I am his downfall. He is the sun in the evening coat. I am the horizon, in which he drowns burning hot. And if this is true, then he will be the vial, in which I fill my poison and die.<em>

_The sickness will be my legacy to him. My delusion. His gift. It weighs in due time, when the opportunity arises. Themortal constant is restored forever._  
><em>It is a circle. A spiral. The band of two individuals who are one in their being and their destruction. We spoil each other, layer by layer, piece by piece, pulse by pulse.<em>  
><em>We want to exist independently. But we can not leave each other alone.<em>  
><em>I have sown addiction and he has watered the seeds with his curses. It's hard not to take a second bite of the fruit of knowledge, if the first has already been tasted and found to be divine. In our own, diffuse world there is no God. We do not need Him. We pray with knife and fork, with shackles and scars. We complement us. Complete us and yet we constantly bring ourselves in dispute, lacerate with words and deeds. Our suffering is the suffering of others, and we take it in stride.<em>

_The similarity promotes wounds, but we wear it with pride, because we know who we are and belong to._

_But what if the construct becomes cracked?_  
><em>What if the tree rots on its roots and the buds wither before they can be picked?<em>

_I have considered many scenarios that could end in disaster. I keep control, I'm keeping it as ever, but sometimes even enough control can't take account of unforeseen incidents and mitigate their consequences._

_Another awful nice aspect of man: The circumstances of his environment are more unpredictable than his own psyche._

_The wine glass nestles pressed in my hands, the cherry red liquor curls at the minimal fluctuation. One drop on my tongue and the bouquet of cabernet, cedar and cassis impregnates my tongue. I would like to drizzle this wine over your face and bite it from your lips, darling, but you're not here._  
><em>You, my wonderful mate, soon my hubby, my bright counterpart do not sit at my table today and also yesterday, the place beside me was crowned with emptiness and the room wrapped itself in the silence of defeat.<em>

_No one ever said it would be easy. This life. This love. The agonizingly slow suffocation of that love. The loss, you can not compensate with tears._  
><em>No one ever said it would be easy to lose what you have won once. To understand it. Recognize it.<em>

_No one ever said it would be so hard not to give up._

_I never understood it to stand on the side of the fleeing crowds in battle. Not if the price of surrender is too high to move in a comfortable setting._

_Tell me, does heset you up, taking his trophy and lock it in his cabinet? Does he ogle with your polished porcelain façade every day, courting it, touching it ?_  
><em>All the work I invested, all the trouble I prepared myself for, all the kisses, the whimpering, the confessions that I have coaxed you and should only stay between you and me - shall he get them now and I remain kneeling in morass, weighted with dirt and wrung out, sprinkled with blood and filth like a whipped dog?<em>

_Does he deserve this? Does he deserve __**you**?_

_No._

_He is the snake that has crept into our paradise. Eden will fall. Our rings will rust. Our federal government will be desecrated._

_Should it come to this? Do you want that?_  
><em>Oh, you don't know what you do to me, when you look at me like this. When your gaze falls to the ground and you hardly dare to raise your head in my direction. So ignorant. So afflicted. Our time is limited, pretending on the meetings.<em>  
><em>It's like before, like when we did not know each other and I was not more than a disagreeable stranger to you who put his needles carefully into your brain and stabbed, curious what nerve you would stir this time. It's like this routine again and yet not the same. It hurts. The pain is new and the tears, the tears that should not be cried, lie fresh and wet on my face.<em>  
><em>You beg to me, ask me for answers that I can not give you, for things that I'm prohibited to tell you. I shall grant you no enlightenment. No quality. No relief.<em>

_I can not even tell you that the man with whom you are sharing bed and stove at this moment is not the one which you have learned to love with an almost morbid fervor and let into your mind, your soul, your body._  
><em>I can not explain that it is not his arms, where you should rest every night, not his house, in which you should eat.<em>  
><em>I can not tell you that you are mine and not his. You've never been supposed to be his until that fateful day ...<em>

_But you feel it. Feel this nagging doubt in you. This __**why**? You feel it sprout like weeds weaving an ivy blanket over your heart and your stomach._  
><em>It's a shame to cling to a hope, to imagine, to fear, but when there is nothing left, then only hope remains.<em>  
><em>The hope that your storm draped ice will mingle with the fire in my iris hope that you feelest in the dark and I reach for your hands and send them away only until my grip you has peeled the meat from your bones.<em>

_Butnow I have to wait._  
><em>Must keep track of how close you are lacing control your jacket around your bodyand the door closes behind you. I must watch you leave from my home, which was once <strong>our<strong> home. From a life that was once ours, too._

_Away from a love that sparked the grotesque in you and towards a love which celebrates lies into a mosaic._

_Oh, Amnesia. Today, I'm your wounded man ._  
><em>But for how long has this sting to sit in my flesh until you pull it out?<em>  
><em>How long? How long !?<em>

_My patience exhaustes day after day. And my wrath will soon prevail reason._

_As they took his sacred Patroclus from Achill, he slashed the Greek king's son Hector down to his heels, tied his body to a chariot and left him revolving around the tomb of his beloved friend for twelve days__. He brought the war the turning point and the Roman armies to victory over Troy. He floated a whole city in flames to atone for the theft of his love._

_Do you want this revenge, Frederick?_  
><em>Do you want your pale body adorning the roofs of your institution?<em>  
><em>Ipso it will be this way.<em>

_Twelve days took Achill as deadline. Twelve weeks will be mine. Will has to decide. If the time limit expires, **I** will do it._

_Another sip of sweetened blood in a glass dress. The cost of your squashing bones between my teeth. My fingertips clutching in wild curls, while I put a bite of your spicy meat on his tongue._

_His enjoyment. My triumph. My dream._

_Twelve weeks, Frederick._  
><em>Twelve weeks until your death.<em>  
><em>Twelve weeks until Patroclus and Achill come after Eden again, wrapping your intestines around their hips.<em>

_Twelve weeks in_

_**Amnesia.**_


	3. Heart cry

_"When the heart cries, the mind is numb." _

_~Walter Ludin~_

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><p>The world had become deaf when Hannibal closed his ears from it.<p>

He opened his eyes after he gently tilted the phone to the side and then laid it down on the smooth, cool surface of the kitchenette, embedded as a thorn injured rose on the breast of a warm corpse .

He pushed his eyelids open, stretched them into fully width circles of pupils. Painful. The jagged light of the flashes coming from the distant storm in the back of the house burned into his retina, leaving broken hatches behind in the white of his eyeballs and chose to spread few coral red veins with a bloody tinge. The vegetating, maroon iris dipped into the dark tone of dripping wet obsidian, inhuman cold and heat equally biased in it. One look, enough to melt bone and to etch down the cobwebs of a miserable child's soul. Hannibal loosened his grip on the phone and smelled the bitter nuance of the plastic case, as the cool goo stuck to his fingertips. Fingertips that usually clung to the scent of fine food and oriental occultic spices and salty bitter sea breeze. He felt the soft tapping of his skull, the need to put his hands under the faucet and turn up the water. And watch as the crystal clear glowing beam rained on his skin, similar to a vengeful concoction of God, as the continuous drops dug with metallic hardness in his flesh and tore it from his bones. Whitewashed him. He got caught in this self-proclaimed illusion like a protégé in the sheets of his tutor and he liked it, liked it, liked it far too much...

The faucet remained untouched. The smell of the plastic case on his fingers dried.

Seven minutes later, Hannibal was sitting in his Bentley and drove along the highway while the night stretched her cold bat wings across the sky and headlights of other cars flashed epileptic in the darkness. Hannibal looked ahead, saw the gravel road, the dreary gray of metal and concrete in addition to strong forest growth and scrub slopes. His attitude was very straight, his face rigid, notching the immovable mouth as in marble palisades. The only thing that distinguished him as 'alive', was the regular rise and fall of his chest and from time to time an incurred blink of his eyes. His bent down fingers left imprints on the steering wheel. If onelooked closely, one could easily see the vehemence with which the plaster white knuckles were trapped in the foam.

No tremor. No quake. No whimper. Absolute control.  
>Hannibal was the calmness itself.<p>

_Will ... car accident ... hospital ... come quickly ! _

The only words he had allowed to memorize in his thoughts. Jack Crawford had informed him on the phone. Why Jack Crawford? Why he and not anyone else? Why Jack? Hannibal drove into a curve and was almost cut off by a driver of less careful variety, but only noticed it on the edge of his conscious like a horse would have noticed a busily humming fly that crawled on its nostrils.  
>The psychiatrist did not understand why this fact reminded him of an angry bite in the calf. A red light flashed in his face, his right foot brake pedal was routinely pressed down and he realized it, for realization was what always came too late and usually last. When the light switched to green again, he drove on.<p>

Jack Crawford had known about Will's misfortune** before** him. Meaning Jack Crawford was still selected as emergency contact in the files and so Will's adressed caregiver, although Hannibal and he were engaged for one month now and should be married in a maximum of two months, in early spring. For people from outside that was probably a tiny, terribly insignificant detail, hardly to speak about and hardly worth the waste of a single breath pumped through the lungs.  
>For Hannibal, this detail was essential. And it was still essential to him while he parked in front of the Baltimore State Hospital and headed to the entrance, electrically fanning glass wings opening as he slid through them. He was probably anxious to moderate the pace of of his steps by using the pulse rate his quiet heartbeat.<br>But he forgot that he did not hear his heart, as he did not hear the frightened honking of cars when he had raced past them and the chalk-pitched scream the woman had uttered when he was driving on in a horrific pace despite red-rimmed traffic lights. But maybe he would remember it later and consider it as a missed opportunity. It had been rude of this woman to yell after him.

He heard nothing until the doors hooked behind him in their tracks, tasted the bouquet of disinfectant, watery wounds, pain and spilled salt in oxygen and saw Jack sitting on a bench in the waiting area of the hospital, elbows on clumsy knees and knuckles oppressively bent against the end.

_Will ... car accident ... hospital ... come quickly ! _

The only words he had allowed to memorize in his thoughts.

After that, the world had become deaf. And he with it.

* * *

><p>Hannibal stretched his back and took a deep, slowly mastered breath. Listening to the monotonous pattern of his own blood pressure swelling in his veins urged his thoughts to peace.<p>

The first signs of stress planted like twiners on his back, clinging to his muscles and tickled his ribs with careful penetrance. An irrefutable signal that, firstly, the waiting time that he had already spent here forcefully exhausted the patience of his physical overextension too much and secondly, that the quality of this chair was definitely kept in the milieu of cheaper furniture.  
>Thoughtfully, but without greater interest, he let his stern gaze wander beyond the boundaries of the waiting area. He saw pale flattering coats and bustling people, extremely busy in the familiar yet foreign establishment. He remembered the time when he kept the profession of a successful surgeon. A carousel of images, similar to the grid of a dust-stained roll of film revolved in his mind. It seemed almost miraculous to him now how this system of uncoordinated shouting, tinny telephone systems, appealing calls, erring bodies, the headless talks from patient to patient, blood tests, CT's instructions, operations written on the board, should work. But it did. Maybe not as effective as it could be, but good enough to prevent a catastrophe. Hannibal took off his jacket, folded it with usual prestige and placed it as a pillow on his lap, tugging the wrinkles from the fabric, clapping his hands over it. He avoided to watch Jack on purpose, even grazing him with a single look would have implied a level of alertness that Hannibal was not willing to give at this moment. The FBI agent sat across from him on the bench, straight as an arrow, staring to the ground. His powerful, broad figure, the human rock not even a hurricane could have moved from his place, had already tried to start a sustained conversation with the psychiatrist before, but after a couple of unsuccessful approaches he had sunken in the silence of his personal misery. Hannibal was truly glad about this reaction. Although it was not in his nature to block his fellow men so rudely otherwise, but in his defense, the parameters of their situation offered not necessarily the stuff for a happy small talk. It would have been grotesque to even think of rubbing a smile on their mouthes in a place like this and circumstances such as these.<p>

Hannibal glanced at his watch. Since his arrival, 46 minutes had passed. He had forgotten how tough time understood to last when it only got the opportunity to demonstrate its finality. A sad realization, as the psychiatrist thought and maybe he would have reveled in musical moods on the transience of life and the portrait of a Chesapeake Ripper corpse, covered with de-energized autumn leaves and bitten cherry stems hatched in coal yesterday, but yesterday was yesterday and today was now. And now, it was no day to feast on art. Now was a day - more a night than a day, if one thought about the state of the pointer on the baby-faced dial and the pearly black sky structure - to wait.

Wait. Wait ...

Waiting for death.

"Hannibal! "

He smelled Alana's perfume before he heard her voice, overloaded in panic. He raised his head, looked to the running woman. Her hair fluttered in sluggish waves of mezereon on her shoulder blades, shiny dark and soft and wet from the battalion of wind and hailstorm. A few ink-colored strands stuck to her picturesque red cheeks, her blue eyes covered in a deep-lashed sea of nervousness and the anxiety of being too late already. Raindrops clung to her crisp white jacket, jingling there like a glass bead game on the pure substance. The frantic clacking of her high heels echoed like drumbeats in his sensitive hearing and Hannibal wasn't able to judge whether her appearance pleased or annoyed him.

Earlier he had enjoyed every conversation and minute of her company, but since Will had come into his life, he had encountered an increasing distance. He still kept in touch with her, prepared his behavior as his food, refined and courteous. She would always be a polished ruby among his acquaintances, but the fact that his companion had earlier fallen in love with her (and maybe would do again if Hannibal would suddenly depart this life, something that he definitely not intended to do in the next few decades), he never forget and he brought it to speak as rarely as possible. It neither dressed his style to tear fresh wounds because of pure malice, nor did he unnecessarily poked in old scars. Therefore he had simply limited / minimized occasions with Alana Bloom and Will being in one room without his special observance. He'd prevent them to explore _their old affection again_, let it melt like a snowflake on dry wood, even before it was able to catch fire. But if this desired effect did not work Hannibal would use a more definitive output ... but he admitted that he was not too happy thinking about it, primarily because Alana's death was the death of a pleasant conversationalist and it would have cost him a satisfactory influence too - What appeared useful, he preserved as late as possible in his fridge.

He rose from his seat, as his education commanded him. She came to a stop a few feet away. Diamonds reflected in her suffering eyes, a suffering he kept strictly hidden himself behind his mask. He begrudged her for the option to wear all her feelings freely on her face.  
>"How is he?" Her voice broke into syllable shards from her rose quartz lips, quiet and sad and perfect to intersect with sharp edges into the soul flesh of fellow men. To Hannibal, however, it only filed the fabric of his tie.<p>

"He's undergoing an operation now." he told her dutifully. "That's all I know. I wanted to help, but the medical profession does not allow a surgeon to cut open patients who are close to him. The emotional stress and the fear of losing their loved ones by own failure, could reflect in damaged work-"

" - especially since it has been probably more than ten years that you hold a scalpel in your hand." A bright baritone added behind them, fed into a cold that made the windows rattle. Hannibal held still. His face remained in expressionless manifestation, but in thought his cloudy soul mixed with inky drops. He knew this voice very well, had it often loaded to his dinners and served a variety of dishes.**  
><strong>Hannibal imagined to hear icecubs bounce in his blood against each other as he turned to the voice's source.

The figure of a middle aged man greeted his battered optic nerve. He tapped the lower end of his stick, he was constrained to carry with him since the tragic incident at the observatory, slowly to the ground. _Tock Tock Tock_. As the heart beats of a wilting flower in late autumn. "Finally, we don't want another disaster to happen..." he still announced, quoting his previous comment. The sarcasm faded lilacs from his tongue and his lips pointed oiled. They looked at each other. Hannibal was silent.

The silence ran down like flies on the plastered walls of the barren building. None of the three people moved. As if from a distance afar, Hannibal heard the sighing creaking of the chair, as Jack rose to his full size. His steps were like the regular echo of a golden gong ringing for meditation. He joined their side, so that the psychiatrist was flanked by human shields on both sides.  
>"Dr. Chilton." Alana finally hissed, broke the silence that was only bridged by the sounds of the hospital's daily routine. The pure disgust crept like an uninvited guest from the back room of her heart and manifested itself on her beautiful face, brought it to glow in rahge. "What are <strong>you<strong> doing here anyway?".

"Why this spontaneous hostility, Dr. Bloom? Does it frighten you so much to think Will Graham could mean something to me, too? Incidentally, Dr. Lecter – " He turned directly into Hannibal's direction. A wan smile touched his mouth and shaved the chin underneath. "I couldn't express my congratulations to your engagement yet. I hope you may find our profiler in a condition that is still suitable for a happy wedding..."

"Don't say things like that." Alana interrupted him angrily. Her laboriously held, superficially draped control broke like the Titanic when it collided with the iceberg. Just as the fuselage cracks won and licked up the water through leaks, her lower lip wavered, trembled incessantly. Her eyes swam in an ocean of tears. "It's all bad enough without your suffocating gloomy theories." she said. Then the first tear ran down her left cheek. Hannibal handed her a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He said nothing. He knew far too well that we would probably now be expected to put an arm around the trembling woman or to donate a physically ambitious consolation otherwise, but he could not. For the first time since ever the ship of his mind sailed in a storm and his heart, poisoned with emotions, this disgustingly whimsy, strong throbbing organ held the wheel and yanked and dug its nails into the rotting wood and plowed algae under his skin.

Chilton officially seemed to spare no pity for her. His face framed in stoic coolness. Hannibal was not too happy, but somehow he envied the psychiatrist for it. Yes, for the volatile limit blink of an eye, he really felt envious. What a strange feeling.

"I'm just realistic." he replied dryly, winked at Hannibal. "Right, Dr. Lecter? Prior to your psychological career you were working as a surgeon, so what kind of damage are we looking forward to? Share your prognosis with us."

Hannibal's lips incarnated into a pencil thin line.

"Each case is unique as Will's brain structure is that gives him his high-resolutionary empathy. I can give you no information about any damages, nor decorate the actual seriousness of the situation with air cocoons. It would be better to wait and hope for the best, rather than indulge in illusions."  
>Chilton's mouth sagged derogatorily.<br>"So you are just as clueless as we all are. Disappointing. I had expected more from you." he judged nasally.  
>Alana's eyes, still silently thanking for using the cloth, lay in wait above the fabric, now monstrously outraged. Her iris sizzled in blue charcoal.<br>Jack put his mahogany brown paw on her petite shoulder, before she could even dare the attempt to jump on Chilton's throat.

"Calm down, Alana." he said imploringly and cleared his throat, drawing from the Canyon of his breathing lungs. The timbre in his dark eyes preached the verse of Agnus Dei. "Grief has many faces. Concern has even more."

Hannibal watched instinctively at the hardly noticeable, weighed-like change that peeled over Jack's warm stone face at these words. The word _Bella_ was written all over his cheeks and forehead, therefore he probably knew what he was talking about.  
>Then he turned his attention back to Alana. He also couldn't bear a verbal altercation between the two psychiatrists currently. "Alana, would you please bring us some coffee? I've seen an automatic just round the corner." he asked, casting a cold glance to Chilton. "I believe, Frederick could tolerate a hot drink too. To calm down."<p>

Chilton merely snorted. "No need." he spat, sullenly stumbling aside and walking a few steps, went the same path back then, piece by piece, rhythmically accompanied by the impact of his stick, not paying attention to the others anymore as if their presence had dissolved in airborne particles. _Tock Tock Tock_ wailed the floor. Alana was confused first, but then she went without a word, following the desired request. Despite that her reluctance was only too clearly paved around her questioning eyes. (But she had to recognize the logic, because she was shaking herself, not only from overwhelmed weeping, but also from external cold.) She moved down the hallway and disappeared around the next corner.  
><strong><br>**Hannibal felt disguised relief, centered himself entirely to Chilton whose gestures bothered him. He thought that Gideon's previous treatment (only a few months) occurred pain for any movement the psychiatrist took and he wondered why he published this senseless sequence still, although it would have been simple to sit on a chair and wait. When he saw Chilton completing this procedure a third time, he realized that this man accepted the pain voluntarily. That he did not want it in that moment, but needed it nevertheless. Pain meant function. Pain meant life. Pain shooed away powerlessness. The knowledge, moreover, to be able to feel pain, created the illusion that they one was still able to make a difference, even when the situation seemed hopeless. The haggard framework and the dependence of other individuals was painfully real though.

Even Hannibal was currently succumbed to this pattern and he hated it, hated to be on that side. He did not like to see his control slipped away, he did not like to swim in uncertainty until his feet would finally find something solid, wrap greedily around it and pull, gasping for oxygen. Perceiving the world as a washed-out, dull scheme.  
>Curiously enoughhe understoodChilton'smisery, becauseitwas also his own, buthe avoidedit to offerthismaneven oneounce ofunderstanding. This person wasnot his friend, not hiscrony, nothispotential ally. Not anymore,since the eveningof thatopera, after MoniqueBorelli'sglorious voicehad put histrue intentionstowards his fiancé. Hannibalfelt thefeeling ofjealousynotin a natural way,not like most peopleused tofeel it, but he wasquitecapable of tasting a bile taste on his tongue when he noticed that someone got hold of his laboriously selected property.<p>

This. The foreign arm around Will's waist, tightly directing him to another body. The curls drowned in rain, painted on moon white temples, the feverish expression in icy blue eyes, shattered the dark crevice of a pair of shattered lips, the bleeding, excited tone of sensitive skin. The patter on marble railing and smooth floor panels, the screaming thunder over their heads, the fury in the eye of the storm, bathing every minute in pale light. Frederick Chilton's face, internalizing a very different dissonance behind the mask of arrogance.

Envy.

Hannibal was not paranoid, but this scene's impressions haunted him still. It had reminded him of a divine warning. A threat. A memorial. A punctured intestine.

"Excuse me? Are you Mr. Graham's relatives?"

Hannibal whirled around, alarmed. The voice was familiar to him. It belonged to the woman who should assist the responsible surgeon at Will's operation. Her stature was petite, almost boyish, but the strictly French braided bun in her mouse brown hair mocked her young age. Slightly over the age of twenty, but with the intention to prove herself despite her inexperience. Hardworking, perhaps stubborn. But the woman's attitude cared Hannibal at this moment very little as long as it helped to steady Will's pulse.

"We are responsible for him." Jack answered before Hannibal could formulate its own response and secretly he sent a mental kitchen knife through the agent's aorta to punish the rude intervention. _A murder in thoughts saves a trip to the psychiatrist_ it dropped to him abruptly, and some puny, dark barricade in his brain indulged his inner voice in high, campy laughter and the sound corrupted his ears. He swallowed. In this case, it was already queasy enough. The wait had a bitter restlessness roused in him and now it seeked to rise to the surface, but he stopped it, hid it behind his veil of gray and voluminous recapitulation.  
>"I'm his fiance." he said, letting the syllables roll like caramel marbles in his mouth before they jumped off the tongue. And he hoped that Chilton heard it and that it strangled his throat.<br>He watched the woman with a gentle, but subliminally strict view. She tried to resist him, but after four seconds she declined nervously and gave answer:

"The operation went well." she said. "We've found a brain haemorrhage, but stopped it quickly. He seems to have worn neither a head injury nor other damages. A few contused ribs and bruises, but nothing seems alarming. We keep him for observation overnight. Pure precaution." She gave them a thin smile. Her face was without makeup and the dark circles under her eyelids stung out like the empty holes of a skull. "You may consider yourself happy."  
>"I would be even happier if this dramatic accident had not happened at all." Hannibal told her politely. His jaw hardened. "Can you please tell me whom I have to <em>thank<em> for this?"**  
><strong>At first it seemed as the assistant doctor wanted to ignore, but changed her mind then. (Why? Perhaps because this older man summoned a so engaging, no protest commanding aura that she did not dare to talk back, or worse, to have no words at all.)  
>"Mr. Dolarhyde has suffered internal bleeding and a broken leg. He also complains about horrible lasting migraine, but we couldn't find it's cause yet. He will survive, too." she added and bit shortly after on her lower lip like a school girl who had divulged the secret of her best friend to the most notorious clique of the entire school by mistake.<br>Hannibal smiled friendly, severity hardly disappearing in his eyes. It was her reward.

"Alright. May I now visit my fiance?"

"Uh- he still sleeps -effect of the anesthesia. I don't think you'll find him awake." she said doubtfully.

Hannibal felt the increasing discomfort creeping over her. He smelled it. A mixture of spicy sweat on forehead and armpits, an acidic contour of adrenaline-fired fear and the distinctive smoky touch of panic. Jack noticed it too, because the psychiatrist felt how his suspicious onyx gaze sat on his back. Alana was caught too much in the swirling morass of her own Feelings to perceive the change in the behavior of the other woman and to draw conclusions on her own. Chilton stood somewhat apart from them, denied from a more intensive screening.  
>Nevertheless, Hannibal took no chances. He had to end this conversation quickly.<p>

"This is not of importance." he explained. "It suffices me to see him, and he will probably be happy to wake up and greet my familiar face."

The young woman seemed torn. Her frogspawn green eyes flickered around, fixed point to point, but never tangled voluntarily in the psychiatrist's field of view.

"Well ... yes, but even-"

"Which room number? " Hannibal interrupted her, and he did it with the warmest smile humanity could offer.

"66, but Mister, I really don't thi-"

"Then everything is fine." Hannibal cut her off. Neat and clean. Without unnecessary pain. He had learned to lead the scalpel this way. He sewed an expression of goodness in his facial features. "Thanks for your help. Your support has saved my dearest. One day you will certainly be a great doctor, and I don't judge you here not as an amateur, but as a former surgeon."

The compliment had the desired effect. Her cheeks flushed immediately like plump peaches kissed by a sluggish spring sun. She stammered a _Th-Th-Thank you_, turned on her heel and staggered back into her more professional home range.

While that she tumbled a litte, as she would fight to shake off the aftermath of a hypnotic trance.

Hannibal stared after her without really looking at her, saw through the shape of her body. In ten minutes he would have forgotten her. She was inconspicuous, unimportant. Expanded to incarnate average. Hannibal served no average feast on his table. It would have included the danger to bore him.

He thought of Will ...

_The operation went well._

How dusty it had sounded from her mouth. Like a vile bagatelle. A farce, a mockery even.

_"Tear off the masks, we want to see what rots underneath!" _

And the Headless Horseman gave them a hollow laugh, ripped the hat pulled over his forehead from the remote host, allowing all guests with strong bent pride to admire the tar black hole that was decorated gleefully with his snow-white neck ruff.

"This side of you is new to me, Dr. Lecter.¨ said the agent beside him and Hannibal tasted a hint of frowning abstinence in the sonorous bass, as it smoked in his ear. He turned his head, his eyes a single conjugation of _being._

"We rarely know what ferments within us, before the occasion compels us to carry it into the sun.¨ He made a melancholy sigh. The shell,which walled his true nature, acted obviously ashamed. "I'm not proud of it, but if I seek after a specific information, I can be very persuasive, Jack. Especially if it comes to Will." In his thoughts he dabbed the last name with honey leaves. Sticky sweet, but rough, freshly seasoned by the downpour of days gone by ...

Jack straightened his back, pushed the collar of his dark wool coat a bit tighter around his neck.

"Indeed." he said. "It's ... a small miracle after all. If you consider that the car rotated three times before it finally came to a diagonal stop. Just a few bruises, not even broken bones. Incredible."  
>Hannibal mused that his opponent thought of his wife again and the arid life thread on which her existence clung. He smiled.<p>

"Interpret it as guardian angel to go? I wouldn't have taken you for a spiritual visionary ."

Jack shrugged his massive mountain shoulders.

"God moves in misterious ways."

"Will has never proved guilty towards God." Hannibal did rotate his view, perceiving the people around them vaguely. Everyone seemed to be hurt in their own interpretation. "So why did He sent him a careless man like Dolarhyde? ¨

The agent smiled a bit.

"I think this is more in the profession of the devil, Hannibal.¨

"Even the Fallen one respects innocence." he said, barely making the effort to shake his head in additional denial.

Jack just opened his mouth to retort when the metallic growl of sliding doors spread before them and three overly familiar figures went in. A young woman walked forward, while two older men were involved in a stimulating conversation directly behind her. Diversely chattering they discovered Crawford and Hannibal in less than two minutes, as they would possess eagle eyes. They came up to them.  
>In unison, Jack promoted a strangled groan from his lips.<p>

"Oh my, the cavalry is arriving." he grumbled. "And the Valkyrie pulls her two courting chariot horses behind her without any mercy."

Hannibal stayed neutral.

"I am pleased that Will enjoys a higher popularity than he would have expect himself.¨ he said, leaned slightly forward. Confidential. "Nevertheless, it would be better to pay him an individual visit first. What do you think?"

"Oh, I agree. He needs some rest." Jack nodded to the psychiatrist. Transferred him his charge. An urge for protection, as Hannibal had assumed for quite some time now.

"Go to Will. I'll explain it to Alana and the rest of my team."

Well, that was something Hannibal didn't have to be told twice.

"Thank you." he said, and left. Left the place, left Jack and his forensic science colleagues that would assail him with questions before the agent could manage to open his mouth shooing and barking them to calm down. He left Frederick Chilton, who he now officially considered as troublemaker and expendable comrade. Perhaps even as rival, but it took more grotesque situations than a waltz to see a genuine, serious threat in him. He could still hear the echoing noise of Alana's clicking shoes on his left side, as she hurried back to the waiting area, holding several cups with hot steaming liquid in her hands. Yes, he left them all. Though their concern for Will was real, their grief and their tears, he didn't care.  
>He did not like to take risks. He hated to wait. Especially if it was Will Graham with the Poseidon blue gemstone ring on his left hand who clearly represented the most imposing, most vibrant risk of his entire life.<br>Only he was allowed to receive it with joy. With pleasure. With greed. Because the price was too precious. Because he felt it was a waste that one day this man should belong to another, inferior individual.  
>Because he had chosen Will. And Will had ultimately chosen <strong>him<strong>.

_Thank you_

Hannibal crossed the bland corridors like a murdered spirit ghosting through yellowed living rooms, ignoring the nurses and preservationists making their way in opposite directions. Once one bumped into him, mumbling a rough apology before moving on. Paradoxically, he found the ignorance in this case quite pleasant.  
>His senses were circling like vultures in metallic smelling carrion.<p>

_Thank you._  
>Rarely had he been so honest with this word, such as in today's night. Although it was confusing even to himself, whom he <em>really<em> thanked.

But the better he knew, who he would put on his black list. It had been extremely rude of Mr. Dolarhyde to bother Will's health with an car accident and chasing him out of the traffic of life in a most literal sense. The profiler had been driven home from work. Hannibal had prepared dinner at that time. Cooked lobster with green asparagus and coconut milk, a delicacy from Sylt (Will still harbored a subtle distaste for food that included human flesh, which Hannibal wanted to cast away, at least after their wedding). He had the vital shaking shellfish just pressed into the hungry seething pot when the phone rang and he had innocently wiped his hands on a dish towel before picking up the phone.  
>Since then the lobster swam as ever as provisional bloated corpse on the fluctuating levels of the pot. Dead, but intact and inedible. A horrible waste.<br>At this thought Hannibal remembered to his own annoyance that he had not asked the assistant doctor after Dolarhyde's room number, too. But he would find out soon eitherway. He was trained to locate sites, appropriate times and circumstances for creating his design. So no reason to steer someone into a quiet room and pull the skin from his or her flesh. Though ...

Hannibal had reached his goal. Room 66. A third number and the psychiatrist had deemed the election as satanic humor. The door was closed. His hand wrapped around the copper-colored knob. It was desert dry.  
>He took a deep breath, feeling the oxygen stroking his larynx with a tart coolness and filled his lungs.<br>Then he opened the door and everything sat down on the wheels of tragedy's fate.

* * *

><p>The inhuman beeping crawling like a chain through the air was the only source of noise in the whole room, as Hannibal entered and closed the door behind him. His gaze slid across the room, covered by skeleton colored light that was sent from flickering tube lights on the ceiling. On a monitor, the pulse frequency was displayed. The accurately drawn lines smeared in form of foliage green mountains and valleys in the dull, dark swamp of screen and it almost reminded him of the painting skills of children fingers, whose imagination was coined beyond life and death yet. Finally, he embedded his attention to the man he had risen in his Bentley for.<p>

Will's skin shone like fluorescent wax. His curls pressed dull and flat on his moth-bluish temples. Scratches nested in flowing color palettes, wandered over his face, neck and the front of his heaving rib cage. His bare arms, crouching limp and lifeless on the bed sheet, were reminiscent of a fine-lined labyrinth that had been drawn with the tip of looped scissors. Probably caused by glass splinters of the bursting windshield while gravitation had turned around the car several times. His pelvis was hidden under a blanket. Hannibal was silent. He compared Will with a rag doll but felt a forbidden majesty in this production. A morbid longing that he could not put into syllables.

_Disease and life_, he thought. _Health and death, what is the difference? Is not all anchored in the same universe? Does not everything serve the same destruction?_  
>Hannibal saw art in the sadism of modernity as well as in the nostalgic decapitation of the Middle Ages. For him, murder was considered to be a form of expression and creativity and perversion he often translated with the freedom of the human will. He was driven nature of a man dubbed the ugliness with gloss and chastity rather than looked at many occasion as an obstacle as a virtue.<p>

And in this moment, this small duration of a heart cry as Will's mouth gently cringed in anesthetized sleep and his breath flew audible in the atmosphere, such a tender feeling swelled in his chest that it almost brought him to lose his composure. It flooded his veins so intense, so full and awful that he felt an ailing chirping in his calves and he had to sit down on the chair standing invitingly next to the bed. Will's right hand rested only a few centimeters away from him. He leaned forward, took it in his. His lips thinned out. Wills skin was as cold as the frost flowers painted on their windows in late winter. He kept the hand, warmed it with his own pulse and flesh.  
>The tip of his thumb stroked gently over the knuckles of the profiler. Protectively. Devastating. Like porcelain.<p>

_This teacup is not broken. Not yet. _

Will bowed his head forebodingly in his direction, caught in sensation and medicamentous coma. He breathed steadily. He lived. He did not wake up.  
>Hannibal stayed for a certain period of time in this position and observed his actions. Then he leaned back until the beechwood knocked against his shoulder blades, took one journal, provided by the hospital, from the nightstand, flipped it without special interest and waited. He would not sleep this night. Would watch over the profiler, unlike that guardian angel mentioned by Jack, who had missed this part in shame. Hoping in the creaching dawn everything would be as it had been before. That nothing had changed and Will opened his eyelids and the same, lost, even tortured affection in his ocean eyes spoke to him as it had become a tantalizing beautiful habit for Hannibal.<p>

He waited.

But his hope turned out to be in vain.

* * *

><p><em>And as I see you standing there<em>

_With bloodstained hands and messed up hair_

_Let me watch as you arise_

_Let me praise your lost disguise_

_Let me help your drained tears dry_

_Before you leave without goodbye_

_~A few verses by me~_

* * *

><p><em>Hello my dears!<em>

_I'm so sorry that it took so long but finally I've translated the first chapter and I hope you liked it^^_

_Thank you very much for all your comments, faves and follows. I'm very happy that some people have gained interest for this story :3_

_Well, well, what will happen next? I think you'll have to read the next chapter to find out^^_

_What do you think about the behaviour of Chilton/Alana/Jack/Hannibal ? Were their characters okay? Please tell me!_

_And ... do you remember the name *Dolarhyde* from somewhere else? I've got a tendency for mixing in my plots X'P_


	4. Echo skin

_A wind is blowing! The green lights_  
><em> Sing extinguished - large and satiated<em>  
><em> The moon fulfils the high hall,<em>  
><em> Where no more celebrations sound through.<em>  
><em> The ancestral portraits quietly smile<em>  
><em> And far-off - their last shadow fell,<em>  
><em> The room is sultry with putrefaction,<em>  
><em> Arround which ravens mutely move in circles.<em>  
><em> A lost sense of past times<em>  
><em> Looks from the stony masks,<em>  
><em> Pain distorted and empty of existence<em>  
><em> Mourning in abandonments.<em>  
><em> Sick smells of sunken gardens<em>  
><em> Quietly caress the decay -<em>  
><em> Like the echo of sobbing words<em>  
><em> Quivering over open crypts.<em>

_**~ Georg Trakl, Decay **_

* * *

><p><em>You are my sunshine, my only sunshine<br>You make me happy_

Light and shadow in the mist of solid presence. Blinking, twitching, crackle, pinch. A burning smell in his nose.  
>The world in motion. The world frozen. The world splintered?<br>No.  
>Will is the one who splinters. Who breaks. And falls. And falls. And ...<p>

His fingers sweat and have the temperature of giant glaciers while they clutch the steering wheel like a vice. His feet find neither brake nor gas pedal.

_Where am I?_

_When skies are gray_

He winks. The breath knocks back on him, there, in the backbone of his throat. It feels sore, as if he had shouted. Roared from the ground of his trembling chest like a grenade that accidentally ignited in a secret hideout.  
>Has he? Did he scream? In panic? Out of fear? With rage?<br>Will does not remember.  
>A shade of coal and mud cold blood draws his palate. Furry coats his teeth and feels like hedgehog bristles when he fumbles with the tip of his tongue over it. It all tastes like rotting stone and brass and he thinks of death. He too often thinks about death to be honest.<br>Johnny Cash sings his song, bangs it, babbles it as in mockery, accusing the flag of alcohol. He sounds cheerful, but also so sad sad _sad_. It constricts Will's chest, strangles his lung, wriggles out the air like a salmon swarm in spring.

_What happens here?_

His environment is expressed as a cotton ball dipped in chloroform, dull and bitter sharp. Sounds jump out of the abstinent dark like bat wings. Screeching tires. Pig squealing. The fire iris of two headlamps, throwing themselves at him and scratch the paint of his car.  
>Everything blurres, corners and edges are sanded down and run down on his retina like butanoic acid. It etches, but he does not dare to close his eyelids. A space-devouring painting with tangled lines of oil and ink envelopes him, surrounds him with arms of dust and shadows and they press, press on him. He's never been a great connoisseur and he finds no purity in this morbid mess. He hates it. Nausea kicks over him like an unhappy built tarpaulin and he gets tangled up in it, gasping for oxygen that seems to be replaced by a spongy filter sea of uncertainty. It stares at him from stupid, frameless eyes. So incredibly stupid that he feels the need to lash out at something. Or at someone. Wishing to be not upset anymore. To be never raged again ...<p>

_Are these my thoughts? My aggression? Or does it belong to someone else ..._

Are you a thief, Mr. Graham? Are you a pathetic, puny robber? Do you steal identities?

How can you punish someone for something, what is the penalty in person? How can you lock up someone whose cage is his brain? His own prisoner?

A fine echo skin covers his flesh like lilac flowers branching through thin veins. He feels, sees, smells, hears, tastes, spits and indebted blames anything but himself.

_You'll never know, dear  
>How much I loved you<em>

Will I die? Or am I dead already?

Will anyone miss me?

_'Please don't take my sunshine away'_

No reply. A moan goes through the slithering car when he turns over the first time. Will hears it as from afar. Hollow and tinny. A perfect pirouette in ballet. The performance of the dying swan in the mechanical industry. Different output, same tragedy. The blood is the same too, the color red and fresh. No copy, no nakedness. All original. Will listens to the viscous drops that swell from his cut below his left cheekbone, pushing hot on his chin. It smells of graveyard dirt. He does not know when exactly he has gained this injury. He currently knows very little at all.

The car turns a second time. Will rotates with it.  
>The strap of his seat hooks like cast iron in his shoulder.<p>

_'Please don't take my sunshine away'_

_Turn it off. Switch the damn radio off!_

He wants to grab the radio while he's still in flight, presence of mind palpating the button, but the weightlessness doesn't grant him relief. There is an undertow and he's stuck on it, helpless and fragile. Powerless.

The car rotates a third time. There is a bang, a final cry. The grinding squeal is bump-ligand metal. In his imagination he arranges his rib fragments like dominos.

Then the car is standing still. It leans on the left side of a grass hill and fluctuates like a ship wreck that has run against a sharp jagged reef that slashed the shiny boat belly. Will remains, trapped in steel, glass and fabric. It is a miracle he hasn't broken any of his bones. Fault lines adorn the transparent surface, but no shards have freed and hurt him. Will's pulse plays Spanish harpsichord. Interracial and desolate. His harsh breath clacks like castanets to the beat of his heart.

His body is numb, but intact, the injected adrenaline doesn't allow him pain. He trembles without realizing it.  
>He is defying terribly miserable.<p>

He thinks of a mother he never knew. Only from the stories of his father.

_"You have her eyes, buddy. Her eyes ... you resemble her so much."_

Even in his memory the words taste of gin and a broken heart.

_Please don't take_

My sunshine

Awa -

And finally, FINALLY, the radio is silent though it still chokes out a humming from the racked boxes.  
>Will can not be pleased.<br>A jolt surprises him and grabs him with imaginary hands on his curled hair, throwing him forward with delicious brutality. His nose hits the steering wheel. A cracking, as if a bee breaks its leg. Blood shoots out, paints his lips, his chin and the collar of his jacket.

He feels nothing still. Only that a warm and wet liquid clings to his neck_. Somehow comforting._

For the first time in his life, he wonders if there is a heaven. That there may be a hell, he already knows. He hopes it since the age of ten when he felt that his neighbor had his wife pushed down the stairs.  
><em><br>He loved to hear her whimper. Loved it so much…_

He raises the moaning droning skull when he hears a noise in front of him. An uneaten crunch as if someone chewed on bones.  
>He sees a figure in the fog. Tall, slim, dark. Antlers growing from its temples. It stares at him, red, pupil-less eyes.<br>A gargoyle? A fury? An angel? Will has forgotten the difference. Has shaken it from the pulpy mass of his brain, like much else. Important components, gears, screws, nuts, swivel cords. He falls apart like a carelessly stacked dish tower.

He sees the being move closer to himself. Supple, predatory. Its hands are made of sharpened knife claws, its feet are hooves, reminiscent of that of a deer. It is as black as a moonless night and it is naked. Will takes a rattling breath.

Will it come to get him? Attracted by the noise and the smell of salty sweat and easy prey? Does it want to collect him and pull a few chunks of meat out of his body, tumbling noisily on the floor? Will it eat him up alive or mercifully cut his throat with a bite before it begins his meal?  
>Has the Grim Reaper sent his friend, <em>the Boogeyman<em> today to take care of his whereabouts?

Will doesn't know. Even if, he is not able to escape. How could he? He can hardly move. Not even a straightening is allowed and he can't open the car door for the rest of the left side entombed in pounded earth.  
>The being is only five feet away from him. Then four. Then three. Two. One ...<br>It stops in front of him, goes into a crouch. Their eyes meet, melt into each other. On Will's arms tingles fear. The being is a monster. It's evil, though he particularly intends to blur the boundaries of such termina, heroes and villains. This is one aspect of his gift. His curse. It smolders in his blood.  
>He observes with horror as every fiber of his body tenses, when a clawed fist clenches and flies down in his direction.<br>He closes his eyes and expects the end.  
>His last thought belongs to a man whose name he has forgotten and doesn't know why.<br>And a final question.

_Will he weep for me? I've never seen him weep bef-_

Then the raw crash of a shattering windshield dominates his senses and he is blinded by a loud, bloody and humid darkness.

As the paramedics carry him out of the crushed car, he has lost consciousness long since. They transport him on a stretcher, limp and flatly breathing and cheesy white. He does not wake up. For a few hours he does not need to.

And when he wakes up, he'll soon wish not to have awoken at all.

His **echo skin** screams.

* * *

><p>Will awoke by the sonorous fibrillation of cheap tube lights. Wearily, he blinked through his eyelids, still sticky from bleached tears. The world of the living opened their doors to him in the form of a clinically white paneled shrine. Featureless his eyes looked at a flat, bare ceiling above his head. The lamp, which light had penetrated his senses, shines angrily in his corona. Quickly he looks somewhere else.<p>

_Where am I?_

His gaze wandered insidiously, saw empty walls and a leather couch with cream-colored fabric. He met a window that made him think of a cartoon from wooden poles and twine, he had saw in a morning newspaper with declining interest.

Which morning was it? What's the date?  
>... What's the date <strong>today<strong>?

His ears opened. He perceived busy steps from an opposite corridor, hissing and pickling of foreign voices. The rhythmic beeping of electrical equipment. The choppy roles of smaller wheels, as a cart with colorful medicine jars and a plastic plate covering hot steaming meals was pushed on the course. Will caught a fleeting blink of a young woman in a pearl pink smock dress that billowed gently around her hips and waist.  
>A little reassured, Will slumped deeper into the pillow and breathed in deep and long.<br>So he was not alone. All right. This meant here were people who would enlighten him about everything when he asked nicely. Among other things, why he was stuck in this bed and why his body ached as a bull would have taken him up on the horns, and why he was partly bandaged like a pharaoh's mummy. And at last who this man wasthat sat a few inches away from him on a chair, a magazine about naturopathy in his lap and apparently dozed off ...  
>And behind his back leaned, seemingly bored, the pitch-black deer figure that Will had crowned as his greedy drooling killer shortly before his exhaustion took him over.<p>

Will's heart put up such a rapid rate that he almost thought he heard the _Klong_ that was caused by the collision against his breathless ribs. Any sudden movement caused a storm of hail ants from their caves, they bit into his nerves and nibbled at them with bitterly evil desire. His heart was beating frantically at the back of his throat now.

_Not you. Everything, everyone, but not you!_

Fanning its withered breath of life against narrowly opened, dusty dry lips, the deer monster watched him, almost sweetly embedding a dangerous paw on the shoulder of the stranger, whose head was tilted slightly to the side in sleep. Dense, ash-blond strands of his hair splayed over his forehead.

_Like the turned out embryonic membrane of a twin soul ... with claws_.

Will had never seen this man in his life and wondered what he was doing here. Keep guard about him? This thought was strange to the profiler, ridiculous, but not invariably absurd. He had obviously been injured, interpreting his wounded, plastered appearance and the plug in his forearm resulting resulted in a plastic bag with liquid and apparently diverted into his blood directly. Although he was not sure what, or perhaps better **who** had bequeathed him this condition, Jack would make sure that he'd be safe now, ready to rest and gain new strength so he could roam at crime scenes again and spit out new information. Like a tin soldier, settled on the flat wooden banquet, amazed by how many steps he could take, he, the skinny doll the skinny doll. Walking so long until he tipped over and played dead man.

He looked at the stranger from a seemingly safe distance. And now, as his mind finally girded in a tense calmness, he was able to realize that the man offered an impressively inhuman facade. Inhuman in the sense of - not from this world.  
>As a precaution, he forced himself to study the stranger's appearance in detail.<br>The man was tall and broad-shouldered. The profile was significantly cut, impregnating a touch of majesty but also wilderness, the flesh held a walnut wood color, the skin of his cheeks was carved with precarious cheekbones. The head shape almost square, coarse and flowing, rough and gentle in one (Will knew no right expression to describe how he actually felt - he could not decide and rather chose everything). He wore a suit made of woven kerosene wool. A crow perched black tie tied around his neck, entwined with a crisp white collar. The long legs ended in dark leather shoes.  
>Will thought of Rome and the statues of carved stone that still stood there in the temples populated by gawking tourists. Their majesty had never aged despite the crumbling tooth of time. Hallowed likenesses of gods and heroes from legends and mythological tales.<br>A sculpture.  
>Yes, the face of the stranger resembled a sculpture's. According to the body, he let his mind wander vaguely. The fabric veiled the most and maybe that was a goodbad thing.

Will took a rattling breathing. At that moment, his opponent opened his eyes and looked at him directly.

The sudden contact caught him like a thunderbolt. Calm burgundy brown looked at him, linked with his point of view, it came to pass, and held it firmly. Will believed feel choking fingertips at his throat felt, but it did not make him turn away. The vortex into which he fell was pure fire and he burned. He was captured, crucified. Cursed.

They were silent. The duration was unlimited, lacked any measure.

The stranger bowed his head in greeting, barely a nod, barely a movement. Interrogative? Nervous? Even shy?

He smiled.

It was as if the evening sun rose over the snow-tipped Alp tops.

But the deer monster smiled too, and its dreary, obscene mouth pierced with a round circulated thicket of pale, blood bathed fangs. _His_ blood.

At that moment, something broke in Wills heart, perhaps forever. And he did not know why. He did not ... he just felt an intense, heady wave, a pain of loss that rolled like the pebbles under his skin and it elicited a whimper. A puppy that was pulled away too rapidly from the milk dripping teat of its mother and rebelled kicking and whining.

Will felt suddenly rarely empty. Hollowed. As they had removed him an organ. Or more. Or ripping the acid mantle of his salty skin.

_Who the hell __**is**__ that !?  
><em>  
>"Will?"<p>

A baritone, like chimney warm velvet beneath his fingertips, washed with a dark, melodic accent over him like a clarifying flood, tore him from his pain, his thoughts, even from the murder being. For a few benevolent seconds.

_He knows my name._

_Why is the sound of his voice so familiar to me...? I hear it for the first time._

_It is beautiful ... (?)_

But how could he recognize this voice while the speaker was unknown to him?  
>The man, however, spoke more calmly.<p>

"You woke up. Wonderful. How do you feel?" He sounded relieved, encased by boundless sympathy.

Will was silent. He wanted to look at the man again, only look at him, but his eyes remained mesmerized of following the monster how it moved its hand from the vital shoulder and instead led to its own face thar looked more like an anonymous Phantom of the Opera. It bent his bony index finger, pushed it to the thin marble lips, incorporated in gloomy shadows.

_Psst_the gesture said and Will's heartbeat quickened_. Psst._ _You have to be quiet now._

Will said nothing. He was paralyzed. His blood poured in winter cool streams through its rigid cores.

The essence nodded vaguely, but benevolent. Delighted.

_Good boy._

Will shook himself. A tremor seized him, making him tremble like a young aspen.

"Will?"

The sudden urgency bathed in his name forced him to be confronted with the stranger's attention again. What he met while raising his gaze was the face that would have fit more in the gold masked angle of a pharaoh tomb than in the unfriendly lit premises of modern medicine.

"Is everything all right? Do you have migraines? Are you in pain? Shall I set the morphine higher?"

Will was very surprised that the stranger brought such care in his questions. Warmth. Exuberant yet real. He did not know him ... right? The profiler thought feverishly.

...

-No.

He had never met him before, not outside this room. Never.

There was no connection.

"Why are you here, Mister?" His voice sounded mechanical. He saved the greeting phrases.

The stranger paused, if only by a hair. He held both face as well as body under iron control.

"Mister?" He raised a delicate eyebrow. "But Will, we've already stored this form of address -..." The baritone wove itself in barely ensnared irritation, feeling as welcome as the acidic sweat bead that climbed down Will's neck.

"I think I would remember that." he snorted indignantly, trying to support and raise himself up on his forearms. A cacaphony of stitches exploded under his flesh as the watering smoky firecrackers of a Chinese fireworks festival. Will gasped for breath in horror, but it seemed as if someone had squeezed every ounce of oxygen from the ambient. His eyes threatened to roll back into his head and his breath grew heavier. The pain was overwhelming, let stars burst in his brain and dance on stage like ceramic dolls.

In less than two seconds he felt a strong, almost unbearably hot hand close around his own wrist. The long fingers pressed like lava in his flesh. At the same time the cold breath of a second existence stroke his lower leg, hidden under the blanket.

He responded quickly. Proposed the uninvited hand away as if it was poison or a snapping bear trap.

"Don't touch me!" he hissed and would he have been an animal, he would have spewed out a warning growl. "Go. Whoever you are, a renegade reporter, one of Lounds' sycophants or an FBI guy I don't give a fuck. I don't want to speak with anyone except my fiance."

The dark Iris sharpened due to the crude rejection. Almost shocked. Or was it even a terrible knowledge that seeped in like water?

"Will, I **am** –"

"If you really want to help me, call Frederick." Will stopped him coldly. The agony and the realization that it had to be alleviated by medication, cut his voice more gruff voice than intended. "My fiance, his name is Frederick Chilton. I guess the name should be known by you, if you work under Jack's regime."

The stranger stood there as roots had dug out of his shoe soles and rammed deep and strong into the ground. A ship with no wind in the sails. Will felt dismay that shimmered like an own, untamed aura around his opponent, but he could not place, why it clung to him so badly. If he was honest with himself, he also didn't care too much at that moment.  
>He was in pain, the inner life of his skull thundered and his mind was plagued with a form of disorientation he had never met before in such pure, <em>pure<em>essence. It was strange, insulting, as one waded through clouds of sugar with the unerring knowledge that a throw of King cobras lurked under the shiny powder, capable to dive out of the snow coloured sand and to wedge their finger thick fangs into his leg at any time, until he went to his knees and they attacked him from all sides.

The stranger stirred again. He did a step toward him.

_"_Will, calm down. It's all right, you're exhausted and-"

The deer beast cut fabric scars in the blanket, pulling hard at his hip. His skeletal chest heaved frantically as if it were laughing. Taunting him. His carbon black hooves left arches on the ground. It was still two steps away from him.

"Get out." instructed Will between convulsively clenched jaw halves. Naked panic welled from his bright dilated iris. "Get out of here!"

He thought he heard something crack miserably in his throat, then he tasted bitter sharp metal in his mouth and coughed. The gray shirt he wore sprinkled with sparkling ruby spots.

A chirping sound, similar to a piercing siren echoed from the walls and three men in color faded clothes rushed around his bed where he writhed.

And he still saw the stranger between the struggling and gesticulating bodies, flashing like a fluctuating torch head in a sea of darkness. His undaunted gaze fixed on him. Reddish and haggard.

_Who is that anyway? Who is -_

The babble of voices was loud, dull and annoying as buzzing flies.

Then he closed his eyes and drifted off again.

He was very, very tired.

* * *

><p>"Explain this to me, Donald."<p>

Hannibal Lecter's face was devoid of any emotional expression. But his voice was sharp and rich like a harpoon. The burning in his deep black pupils reminded Dr. Sutcliffe of the depths of satanic hell as Alighieri had described them in his Divine Comedy. But for some strange reason he was aware the role of the pilgrim Dante had not been transferred to him, but that of Charon, who sailed with the dead sinner souls on his ship and brought them into the more gruesome circles of Inferno. And this man in front of him? He wavered between the portrait of an avenging Lucifer and the judging King Midas. Both statutes seemed not to want to give him any mercy.

"These brain hemorrhage that could be stopped successfully ... " Lecter went on in that awfully quiet tone (Sutcliffe compared it to a path of broken glass, on which he had to wade barefoot and blindfolded). "May I ask if it was located near the hippocampus?"

Sutcliffe swallowed. A small vein on his left temple swelled to shallow throbbing. He had not missed the slightly mocking component, outweighed in Lecter's last sentence. He was terribly reluctant, a similar procedure as the one being a beginner who was responsible for a mistake that made all the organs of a patient inoperable, so they could not even use them for transplantation.

"Yes." he finally pressed out drily and it annoyed him beyond measure to recognize potential in Lecter's derisive glance. His former colleague. The man, who had decided to become a psychratrist after one of his successful operations failed, and yet he still was a whispered legend with an impressive record. Sutcliffe would have given much for harvesting equivalent fame.

"Located right or left?" Lecter went on. Slowly but surely, the psychatrist seemed to like the interrogation.

"You know it makes no difference." Sutcliffe replied lamely instead. Why exactly did he do wrong for having _Will Graham_ on his desk (again)? Why did he have deal with Hannibal Lecter, the man who must think of Will Graham as precious in every possible way, when one looked quickly at the magnificent rings they wore on their left hand? A few drops of sweat glistened on his mustache. He hoped Lecter did not see them.

Of course he saw them, unfortunately.

"I just want to inform myself about every detail I can get." he said politely, but firmly. "Or do I have to consult my lawyer about this?" His European accent broke through, more than usual. Probably the current situation and his increasing anger were responsible for that. That was rare. Sutcliffe had never seen him lose his composure during an operation for once.  
>The strands of his jaw muscles were clearly visible when he answered.<p>

"Right." he said. It was like standing to the wall and expect the coup de grace.

Lecter looked at him, the jacket neatly folded over one arm in front of the heaving chest, his head slightly lowered, his eyes like polished knife edges. Sutcliffe saw a flourishing bloodlust germinate in these eyes and it made his pulse beat stronger against his veins. Although it was not the first time that disappointed relatives bequeathed him with such a view, something about this man gave him the confidence that he could actually mean it ... and it frightened him. A little bit.

"Dr. Stevens will bring me the CT images again, but it seems that Mr. Graham - Will has suffered damage in the region of his long-term memory." he droned (more hasty than intended).

"What do you intend to do about it?" was all he received to pay for this critical information.

"Well ..." Sutcliffe searched for words, thought, before he said: "We are not able yet to assess how bad his memory loss really is and -"

"He forgot me." Lecter cut him off. "The person with whom he was planning to take the covenant of marriage and to spend the rest of his life nearly seven hours ago. And now I'm a nobody, while an acquaintance of ours has moved to my place like a mongoose that forced in an old snake skin. Is this fact not alarming enough!?"

Sutcliffe nodded. "Of course, this is a strange development, but this is one reason we must be even more careful about it. If I didn't know better, I'd say his memories have colorfully mixed in the accident and restructured with existing standards, particularly those of his short-term memory. So Dr. Chilton has automatically taken your place as his fiance and you... well."**  
><strong>  
>This sentence was followed by an awkward silence. Sutcliffe rubbed his neck.<p>

"Dr. Sutcliffe?"

Fast Addressed had heard aufgeschnaubt relief. Better a distraction in the form of meat and color of a third person, for a unending duel between him and the former Star-surgeon of the station.  
>When he turned slightly in the direction of the other voice, Hannibal's movements followed him like a reflection of broken mirror shards.<br>Dr. Chilton stood before them in the passage. A hand draped on the knob of his cane, the other hiding in a pocket of his jacket. He came towards them in modest speed, accompanied by rhythmical knocking. Sutcliffe held out his hand. Chilton took it with a serious expression on his face.**  
><strong>"Dr. Chilton." Sutcliffe greeted the psychiatrist formally, since he did not know what to upscale or dignified level he had to behave in front of this man. "Good thing we were able to reach you so early today. We were already talking about you."

Chilton raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, I didn't drive home if you mean that." he explained rigorously, leaning his weight slightly, causing his figure to shift to the right side. "I kept myself alive with the instant coffee of the hospital until the sun came out. Nasty stuff, but it keeps awake."

"May I ask what is the meaning of his presence here? " asked Hannibal before Sutcliffe was even able to a nod.

Chilton threw him a look that seemed too similar to the one llamas gave before they spit.

"This I'd like to know as well." he said piqued, turned back to Sutcliffe. "Even if I had asked more friendly."

The doctor took a deep breath. His hands clung together, formed a finger roof. He had good reason to call for Chilton. There were matters which could not be postponed, and with this he wanted to finish them early. Even if the products that should result from them would probably not find favor by both parties.

"Will is both physically and mentally stable for now." he said soothingly, whereby he observed a gentle shoulder sink of Chilton. "What he needs now is much more of this stability. An anchor he can hold onto before the next waves wash away him. Too much confusion would poison his mind rather than cure and-"

"Express yourself more clearly." Chilton said. Well, he had an impatient caliber too. Sutcliffe sighed inwardly. _Have I accidentally walked under a ladder today or met a black cat without realizing it !?_

Your friend – _colleague_," corrected Sutcliffe, as Lecter looked at him sharply. "He seems to have suffered slight amnesia during the accident. We suspect it is temporarily limited, but we can not say much about its true standards. Not yet." he added to avoid criticism.

Chilton frowned.

"This is really tragic and I'm sorry for Will's memory loss, but what does that have to do with me?"

"Oh, it has explicitly to do with you." repeated the doctor slowly, licked his parched lips. "Will seems to have brought some definite principles into confusion. He believes that you are his fiance and that you'll marry in less than a year."

Silence. The unbelieving knowledge in Chilton's distorted face. Wide-open eyes.  
>... The blaze in them.<p>

Then.

"WHAT!?"

Chilton looked questioningly to Lecter, who behaved like a statue.

"But what-"

"Dr. Lecter doesn't _exist_ anymore for Will Graham. When Will saw him, he chased him out." Sutcliffe said in a pragmatic voice. "His person is gone, wiped away with a wet sponge from the school board. Will probably transferred all the emotions he associated with him, to you. Was there recently an incident that could have particularly impressed in his memory? One that might have encouraged this influence?"

Chilton thought. Sutcliffe realized that his hand dug deeper into the wood of his cane. Lecter said nothing. His face was similar to a grave. Stony and dead.

After careful deliberation Chilton shook his head.

"No. The last time we spoke was at a reception held at the end of an opera. This has been… several weeks ago."

Sutcliffe sensed a chance.

"Interesting." The doctor folded his arms. "Had there been a dispute? Some sort of confrontation?"

"Not that I knew of."

But the answer came a bit too quickly to be genuine. Meanwhile, Sutcliffe sighed.

"If that's so I can't explain it either. But well, it does not change the fact that his brain pressed the delete button."

"What will you do about it?" Chilton's tone was sour with curiosity. Sutcliffe shrugged.

"Nothing." he revealed, uncomfortably stepped from one foot to the other. "Not yet." he admitted after two breaths. "You were both men of medicine before you changed into psychology. You know that amnesia is always a tricky thing."

"And what should we do? Just leave him in that condition? Pretend as if all was the same?"

"Exactly what I wanted to suggest."

"Perverse." Lecter said coldly, thus latching on the conversation again. Sutcliffe glared at him.  
>"It's merciful." he disagreed." I offer you a gracious period of twenty weeks. Give him his illusion, carry his belongings and everything else that has a nostalgic value to him to Chilton's dwelling and keep him under close observation. Not a syllable about his intimate connection with Dr. Lecter, and <strong>no<strong> allusions to past experiences or anything else that might confuse him and throw his nerves into disarray. If he doesn't regain his memory of his own accord, then ..."

He left the sentence unfinished. None of them spoke a word.  
>No one knew at the end, how long the silence had lasted, as Lecter's voice pierced through the membrane.<p>

"Twelve." he finally summoned. "Twelve and no less. Then he'll be told about everything."

"Oh please, Hannibal." Chilton groaned, rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Are you serious? Three months? Are you scared of cancelling the wedding date?"

"I have not the slightest doubt that Will will recover in the near future."

"Of course you don't." Chilton replied snidely. "But before this miracolous healing begins, you should give me your ring first."

Hannibal stared at him as if his opponent had just asked for one of his kidneys.

"_What_?" His voice was a coffin nail.

Chilton opened his lips to say something, but closed them again and waved.

"Oh, you know what? Keep it. I will buy one for my own, one that suits my style. It will frame the whole thing as even more realistic."

"More realistic?" echoed Lecter skeptical. "Does that mean you agree with the proposal? Without further ado?"

"Of course. After all, I can't abandon someone who's stuck in such a horrible situation." Chilton wore an indignant expression on display, as he could not believe Lecter actually thought he wouldn't want to accept this 'offer'. "Relax. My intentions are of purely chivalrous nature. After the deadline, I'll bring him washed and brushed in a basket on your doormat. I vow this to you."

"I doubt that."

"Whether you're in doubt or not is irrelevant. Here it's just a matter of what is best for Will Graham. And that may apparently be my humble self."

"Guard your tongue."

"What will you do? Serve it to me with lima beans and cooked rice?"

Lecter's eyes narrowed to quietly seething slits.

"You still remember my little joke." he said without recognizable emotion.

Chilton clucked his tongue.

"Your humor remains in memory. Something I can no longer tell from _my_ poor Will now. I'll remember to tell him the joke, when I take him out to a fine restaurant."

Lecter's mouth fell a bit.

"I guess he'll return as hungry as he entered - my experience prophesies me that he needs more substantial fare than your rabbit food."

"Don't worry, I'll show him the culinary arts of vegetarianism. A pleasure he has hardly expanded with you, I guess."

"I know what his body requires most. I take care of my partner."

"So will I." Chilton countered bluntly, pierced at his watch, as if he was already weary of this conversation. "If you can spare time to write me a list of his allergies, please... I want to be prepared for everything."

Lecter's left eyebrow twitched imperceptibly.

"Food allergies?" he asked, but his voice sounded a little hollow. As he would not believe his own words (he didn't).

"**All** allergies." Chilton replied promptly, as he had been waiting for this question. "Also, if he tolerates latex or nicht." he added smugly, grinning.

A confused Sutcliffe looked between the two psychopaths / psychologists back and forth, then the penny dropped. A tenth of a second later burning blood rolled into his cheeks with a smacking sound. That grown men deigned to such childish allusions ... well, they were effective anyway. Hannibal's face remained heroically unmoved, but his skin was chalk white.

Before a physical dispute threatened to take action Sutcliffe raised his arms as he would whistle to a close.

"Dr. Chilton, it would be better if you could go to Will immediately now, Room 66." he interfered. "He has expressly requested you and it would be unhealthy for a patient's condition to be ignored by his relatives for too long."

For the first time since their encounter, Chilton smiled at him widely. But his eyes were strangely dull.

"In fact, doctor, I agree with you completely. Will should get what he needs." he purred. He did not even turn around as he spoke to Lecter one last time. "Right, Hannibal? It's his choice after all."

He turned his back at them without goodbye disappeared in the adjoining corridor, overrun by nurses, slipped through the crowd and was gone. For the moment at least.

Lecter and Sutcliffe watched him go, each loaded with different feelings and thoughts. Then Sutcliffe apologized hastily and put forward (as a defense) that there were other patients, he had to take care of. Lecter nodded. As they shook hands in farewell, Sutcliffe involuntarily jerked back from the cold that was waiting in the psychiatrist's fingertips.

* * *

><p>Frederick could not believe his luck.<p>

The cane clacked in the pace of his footsteps as he crossed the corridors of the Baltimore State Hospital. The occasionally bumping of some employees did not bother him and also the rarely murmured excuses were wiped with noncommittal silence off the disk of his thoughts. It was in an inevitably radiant mood.

He probably would have even sung _I'm walking on sunshine_, if the hospital had not sprayed its oppressive atmosphere. The smell of disinfectant and washing soap wafted around his nose and blocked his senses for enjoyable impressions.

The war of words he had just delivered with Hannibal made his calves still a bit soft, but he held himself upright, crackling by sudden rushes of left adrenaline.  
>He was charged, almost <em>high<em>. And when he got into his stride, he couldn't stop. Words and hidden insults had bubbled over his tongue like champagne or arrows from liquid-shaped wax and they had met their target, _each_ target. He had no regrets.  
>Previously, he could not have done anything like this. Could not have been so <em>nasty <em>at Hannibal Lecter. _Previously._

But now someone had turned the tables. Whether God himself or Dolarhyde, he did not care. However, he would probably send an expensive bouquet of flowers to him and wish him a fast recovery. Two hours before he had cursed this man and said he would deserve a prison stay in one of the cells in Guantanamo Bay._ Now_ it seemed he couldn't pay him high enough for this misfortune. The proven service of it was tremendous. Almost inhuman.

He had constantly speculated how he should secede Will Graham from Hannibal Lecter's influence. He had thought of thousands of variants, discaring numerous of them after careful consideration.  
>Nevertheless, he <strong>wanted<strong> this profiler with the outstanding empathy. He longed to acquire the right of ownership, being able to identify him as a exclusive, personal patient and he sought the sole credit for the results that he could tease out of the extraordinaire psyche of this man, pulling them to the surface.  
>That Will's damaged memory chose him as fiance, leaving Hannibal as nobody, was not that important. No, it merely resembled the coreless Amarena cherry on the powdered cream pie roof of his world.<br>He stopped. The room door Will Graham rested behind, reminded him of the flat compressed template of an ash-gray castle. Number 66 winked at him, blinking, as if to encourage him in taking action.

_The devil's in the details_. he thought, and his lips curled into a slight smile.

Then he gripped the knob, turned it in a bossy way and went inside.

* * *

><p>The room was a bit spooky. Frederick thought more of a chamber of horrors than of a hospital room. The plastic flowers on the window couldn't change anything about this impression. He looked around, saw the waxen wallpaper, completely held in clean white-washed, rare furniture. Then his gaze slid to the bed and the man lying in it.<br>Will's eyes were closed. Frederick wondered if he truly slept or only acted like he did in order to eliminate undue interferences in advance.

He ignored the chair next to Will and sat down on his bed instead. The mattress creaked under the added weight. He ignored it.

Frederick remained in this position for a while, watching the face of the profiler. Despite the incorrigible stubble that adorned his chin and lower jaw, he looked almost unbearably young at this moment. People like Will Graham had become almost extinct in contrast to the other human _species _around him. He was to sensitive for his own good. He was one of them that were easy to kill, easy to maim and torture. Toys of the great powers. Frederick found irony in his thoughts. The whole life was a disaster, in which one was restlessly looking for a punch line that should be never found. For the point of it all that was found in death only.

Frederick sighed inwardly. He soon found himself in the situation of stretching out his hand and watched as it came to rest on Will's cheek, stroking the skin. The stubble poked like little embroidery needles, but it did not feel as uncomfortable as he had thought earlier. The flesh between was smooth and warm and ready to split upon from external influence of any kind.  
>He did not deserve this fate. Not the burden of his forced transfer, not the nightmares that brought him the murders of other people, not the agony of being constantly quartered internally and sometimes not knowing who he was.<br>Frederick knew what Hannibal Lecter saw in this man. Not only based on his mental taste or flaming curiosity.

He had never been particularly successful in distributing his feelings by acts or words of expression. He preferred the armor of arrogance, the shell of his sarcasm. Behind his shield, there was much more to discover than that, including vulnerable tissue. Scar tissue at most. Frederick wondered if Will's scars would make an intricate pattern with his own if they mingled their bodies...

"Will?" he whispered, shaking his shoulder gently. "Hey, Will."

His heart pounded with an irregular hardness against his chest. A thin film of sweat glistened on his neck. He wanted to look him in the eyes. Wanted to get the undoubtful evidence that Sutcliffe had spoken about facts and not some silly speculation. If this was the case, he had verbally stomped Hannibal Lecter into the ground for nothing.

Will produced a humming sound out of tune, as the dotted vibrations from his shoulder moved to his brain. He mumbled. Then he blinked frantically, torn from a dream without a name and without light. The lids snapped open and two circles of shimmering indigo got caught in Frederick's greenish iris. He saw the process, the amazement, the fleeting flash of rage, the knowledge and then ... then ... affection. Unadulterated.

"Hey." Will muttered, and despite the roughened tone sincere joy sounded in his baritone. "You're here."

He whispered, as if one had crushed his throat in a vise minutes earlier. He made a move, wanted to sit up but Frederick acted instinctively.

"Don't boil the ocean." he ordered sternly, and was surprised himself about the strange, almost maternal gentleness in his voice. Will gave him no great difficulties. He slumped back, as the psychiatrist put his hand on his chest and pushed him down into the pillows again. Will grabbed it, covered Frederick's fingers with his and exhaled a slowly trembling breath. Frederick took it as a good sign that he wanted to feel his heat and touch, welcomed it in a genuine sense.

"So, did you sleep well?" he asked, trying to substantiate a pathetic joke of relief in their conversation.

"Disastrous." Will replied tinny, cleared his throat. "One nurse has constantly awoken me to ask some banal questions. What's my name, where do I live, if I have pets and stuff. I have no idea why, must be routine here."

Fredericks hand moved from Will's chest to his hair, stroked through the thickish, unruly curls that were a jungle for itself.

"I could denounce a senior physician." he said ironically, chose the words but only half in jest.

Will raised his mouth to an exhausted grin.

"Nobody likes a snitch."

"_You_ like me." Frederick countered cheekily and already felt more in his element, but also so unusually strange it almost hurt.

Will cocked his head. His eyes sparkled as exposed by mosquito nets, but vigilant.

"Hm,_ like_ would be said too much. You took quite your time with the visit." he replied and leaned forward. Frederick came to meet him, for he suspected, Will wanted to say something, but could not find the strength to speak louder.

But Will did not speak.  
>He kissed him.<p>

Frederick was taken aback when the soft lips were suddenly on his. Instinctively he gave them support, so professional / natural, as he could bring up despite the precipitous situation. He had factores such a tenderness indeed, but never thought that Will would require it so quickly. He had rather preferred to plan it like that night after the opera, as they had danced on the balcony, physically and mentally balanced and intertwined. He remembered how Hannibal had broken in this scene and destroyed everything as he usually did.  
>But Hannibal was not here ... not in this room, and what was even more important, not in Will's thoughts.<p>

_He has just been made aware that he has narrowly escaped death._ _Would you not be hungry for a love confession as well? A proof that it was right to survive !?  
><em>  
>The psychiatrist thought of the hardly elapsing hours, after the doctors had laboriously stitched the remains of his body together.<br>He put his fingers around Will's neck and gently directed him closer, pressing their mouths against each other more forcefully.  
><em>The taste of clotted blood ...<br>_He knew the taste firsthand. And he felt a paradoxical sense of belonging, a common experience. Both of them were alone now. They only had each other to rely on.

He liked this concept better and better. As he had found the lost piece of the puzzle to a church mosaic and put into the missing form. He was ... happy.

Frederick had not even confessed under torture that the loneliness gnawed at him.

He was a wealthy man. Rich. He could have bathed in Dollar Bills every Sunday morning as the Countess Elizabeth Bathory had done joyfully in the blood of murdered virgins, but he had money in abundance badge. He lacked nothing. But his house was big, gigantic even, especially for someone who spent his evenings in seclusion. The emptiness was it that flourished, despite all costly gems and equipment. It had bothered him more and more often over the years.

Will would enrich him in more than one aspect. He was quite capable of providing the necessary comfort, just like Hannibal Lecter could. He could show compassion if needed. His colleagues might whisper behind his back, calling him an arrogant bastard (it tired him to deny this), but he was not made of stone. He had a heart like any other and was needy for romantic contact as everyone else. And also the willingness to engage someone in his life, an intimate caregiver instead of the asshole of service everone knew.

The irony was to taste in the air. The aroma of unripe grapes.

Frederick's breath steamed in the air, as they parted.

"I guess that means you're doing better?" he asked. His voice was thickish somehow.

"I live." came the brief, casual answer, underlined with a gentle laugh. The words escaped from now slightly red mottled, swollen lips. "When can I get out of here?"

"They still want to make some tests."

Will's eyes narrowed and the skin around them turned into delicate, pale crumbling wrinkles. He did not like that prospect as it seemed. Frederick understood him. Since Gideon wanted to turn him into a burst piñata, he also had a healthy dislike of hospitals and everything that had to do with them. He only felt safe in his own hospital - the mental institution -. This was his kingdom. His castle. And his office the King's Chamber. He loved to be his own master, but here among these foreign doctors he was not more than a dirty lint would have been in an alcove. His surgical career had proved to be a gross misstep and Frederick avoided to be reminded of these premises. What did not always succeed.

"And then?" Will asked him with an undercurrent of mistrust.

Frederick smiled.

"Then we'll go home, Darling." The nickname balanced foreign and awkward on his tongue, but it weighed in with a sweet component he expected to taste more of in the near future. "Home. Okay? ".  
>He swallowed a nervous lump down his throat and was looking for Will's hand, held it in a gentle grip. His thumb pad stroked over the sensitive skin around the knuckles. He pretended nothing, he had rehearsed this behavior primarily. But his acting changed, similar to his surgical skills - in lousy area.<p>

The chaste touch relaxed Will visibly, something that made Frederick wonder, when he had always known the profiler as reserved, implying longer eye or body contact not longer than need. Instead, he gave him a smile and gently flickering in his iris. Their fingers were intertwined. Will squeezed back slightly. The accident had left its mark in spite of everything.

"Okay." he whispered. He sighed. "I'm so glad you're here." The syllables were like dead leaves plucked of their trees from the maternal autumn wind and scattered on the yellow grass. The scratches on his cheeks glowed like red painted comet tails.

Frederick reflected the smile with a wider template and forgot to worry about whether he might seem manic or not. "Me too." he said, squeezing Will's hand a little tighter. "Me too."

He would never have guessed that this day, when he had feared the worst, to be endowed with the greatest gift of his life. An unexpected patient AND future partner. Maybe he could turn these twelve weeks he had into something that could last forever. Maybe he managed to outdo even Hannibal by this special opportunity. The great Hannibal Lecter. The impressive Hannibal Lecter. He would take him his beloved treasure and make it his own. He would outdo him, beat him in his own game.

Who should have the power to mess with him now?

He had plenty of time ...

Today, fate loved him to death.

* * *

><p><em>Being able to forget is a great happiness, to be forgotten is a great suffering.<em>

_~ Unknown ~_


End file.
